S1:E1 – Learning Programming At College

<Title>Introduction</Title>

This is the first season of episode 1 of my blog where I will be talking about what it was like learning computer programming in college.

So firstly, the course I was on was a 2 year course, the first year was HNC computing and the second year was HND computing (Higher National Certificate/Diploma). I am from London so the college I went to was a tech based college on the outskirts of the city.

My course did not just consist of programming but also a bunch of networking, system admin, pulling computers apart, rebuilding them and so on. However, I took a particular interest into the programming units (never done programming prior to college). I covered three programming units over the 2 years:

– Game Development– Basic Web Development
– Desktop Development

Spec:– Visual Studio 2010
– C# Programming Language

<Title>My First Experience Programming</Title>

My very first program was a desktop application which said to me.. You guessed it HELLO WORLD! In a message box using c#. That was cool right? But then I got my computer to tell me the exact date and time which was useless but interesting at the time. So this got me thinking! What else can I do? Hmm?

It’s at that thought where I got hooked at programming and this is where my adventure really starts! Well the 2 previous programs were easy peasy right? And we’ll to be honest looking back on it now the whole college programming course could not be easier if it tried. However, at the time it seemed the levels got upgraded by a hard coded login system to be designed and created! I mean come on, hard coded? So we’re not even going to be allowed to do any database work to my great disappointment.

Once the log in system had been designed, created and working the next challenge was too turn our desktop applications into a web based application. Which was slightly more tough at the time but not to bad with the asp.net template web forms. Believe it or not, that was the last time I touched websites for 4 years, I’ve been developing for 5 years in total.

By the time i reached my final coding unit game development, sub story for later in this season, I had a programming apprenticeship so I was starting to get a little nifty at programming. This is where I created my first “epic” desktop game called “Bond Hunter”.

Let me set a visual image of bond hunter. Imagine a maze on a desktop form with lots of different ways to take with an image of “James Bond” moving around the map controlled by AI. Now imagine a user controlled tank that shot its cannon like a machine gun, put two and two together and go hunt your self a bond! I know I know! Amazing right, who wants an app version for their mobile?

By this point along side my apprenticeship I was actually able to help the class out so once I finished my project, I helped my class mates finish their projects which made me feel like a good developer. However, I had only just seen the ice, not even touched it yet and I had such a long way to go and 5 years later I still do have such a long way to go.

To wrap it up, coding at college was a nice introduction to what coding can be like in the real world. College taught me the basics to get the fundamentals which I needed to take into a working environment. College not only gave me the basis of an education for the real world but it also gave me a passion.

For me, programming is not just work, but it’s a hobby so please comment and leave your opinion!

Share this:

Like this:

My name is Andrew, passion for anything technical and fast. I am a software developer from London quick background check I started as an apprentice desktop developer and 5 years later and 2 jobs later i am now a desktop, web and mobile app developer working for a company just outside of London.

My passions is obvious and i love to share and talk about it which is why i am starting developer diaries, a spin off from my popular world of programmers page with over 100,000 fans world wide.